Adolphe Thiers publishes the first two volumes of his celebrated Histoire de la Révolution française in 1823. which founds his literary reputation and boosts his political career.

Having trained for the law, the twenty-four-year-old Thiers had moved to Paris two years earlier with just a hundred francs in his pocket.

Thanks to his letters of recommendation, he had been able to get a position as a secretary to the prominent philanthropist and social reformer, the Duke of La Rochefoucalt-Liancourt; the man who in 1789, when King Louis XVI, asked if there was a revolt in Paris, replied, "No, Majesty, this is a Revolution."

He stayed only three months with the Duke, whose political views were more conservative than his own, and with whom he could see no rapid avenue for advancement.

He was then introduced to Charles-Guillaume Étienne, the editor of the Le Constitutionnel, the most influential political and literary journal in Paris.

The newspaper is the leading opposition journal against the royalist government; it has forty-four thousand subscribers, compared with just twelve thousand eight hundred subscribers for the royalist, or legitimist, press.

He had offered Etienne an essay on the political figure François Guizot, Thiers' future rival, which was original, polemical and aggressive, and caused a stir in Paris literary and political circles.

Etienne commissioned Thiers as a regular contributor.

At the same time that Thiers began writing, his friend from the law school in Aix, Mignet, had been hired as a writer for another leading opposition journal, the Courier Français, then worked for a major Paris book publisher.

Within four months of his arrival in Paris, Thiers was one of the most read-journalists in the city.

He writes about politics, art, literature, and history.

His literary reputation introduces him into the most influential literary and political salons in Paris.

He meets Stendhal, the Prussian geographer Alexander Von Humboldt, the famed banker Jacques Laffitte, the author and historian Prosper Mérimée, the painter François Gérard; he is the first journalist to write a glowing review for a young new painter, Eugene Delacroix.

When a revolution breaks out in Spain in 1822, he travels as far as the Pyrenees to write about it.

He soon collects and published a volume of his articles, the first on the salon of 1822, the second on his trip to the Pyrenees.

He is very well paid by Johann Friedrich Cotta, the part-proprietor of the Constitutionnel.

Most important for his future career, he has been introduced to Talleyrand, the former foreign minister of Napoleon, who has become his political guide and mentor.

Under the tutelage of Talleyrand, Thiers becomes an active member of the circle of opponents of the Bourbon regime, which include the financier Lafitte and the Marquis de Lafayette.

Adolphe Thiers publishes the tenth and final volume of his celebrated History of the French Revolution in 1827.

Adolphe Thiers, who has become very well known in Liberal society, had authored the celebrated Histoire de la revolution française, which had founded his literary career and helped his political fame.

The first two volumes had appeared in 1823, the last two (of ten) in 1827.

The accession to power of the Polignac ministry in August 1829 had made him change his plans to live a literary life, and at the beginning of the next year Thiers, with Armand Carrel, Mignet, Sautelet, and others, starts the National, a new opposition newspaper.

François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, a former administrator in Louis XVIII’s restored Bourbon government has, since his dismissal a decade ago, increasingly involved himself in opposition politics.

Guizot had in the 1820s played an important part among the leaders of the liberal opposition to the government of Charles X, although he had not yet entered parliament, and this was the time of his greatest literary activity.

In 1822, he had published his lectures on representative government (Histoire des origines du gouvernernent représentatif, 1821-1822, 2 vols.; Eng. trans. 1852); also a work on capital punishment for political offenses and several important political pamphlets.

From 1822 to 1830, he has published two important collections of historical sources, the memoirs of the history of England in twenty-six volumes, and the memoirs of the history of France in thirty-one volumes, and a revised translation of Shakespeare, and a volume of essays on the history of France.

Written from his own pen during this period was the first part of his Histoire de la révolution d'Angleterre depuis Charles I à Charles II (2 vols., 1826-1827; Eng. trans., two vols., Oxford, 1838), which he is to resume and complete during his exile in England after 1848.

The Martignac administration had restored Guizot in 1828 to his professor's chair and to the council of state.

During his time at the University of Paris, his lectures had earned him a reputation as a historian of note.

These lectures formed the basis of his general Histoire de la civilisation en Europe (1828; Eng. trans. by William Hazlitt, 3 vols., 1846), and of his Histoire de la civilisation en France (4 vols., 1830).

François Guizot, made minister of the interior in August, resigns in November.

He now joins the ranks of the conservatives, and for the next eighteen years is to be a determined foe of democracy, the unyielding champion of "a monarchy limited by a limited number of bourgeois."

Adolphe Thiers, credited with "overcoming the scruples of Louis Philippe," now ranks as one of the Radical supporters of the new dynasty, in opposition to the party of which his rival Guizot is the chief literary man, and Guizot's patron, the duc de Broglie, the main pillar, as prime minister.

At first Thiers, though elected deputy for Aix, receives only subordinate posts in the ministry of finance.

Adolphe Thiers, who becomes President of the Council—Prime Minister of France—on March 1, 1840, keeps for himself the title of Foreign Minister.

His most notable accomplishment is to obtain from Britain the return of Napoleon's ashes from Saint Helena.

The idea is particularly pleasing to Thiers, because he had just begun writing a history of the Consulate and Empire, in twenty volumes.

Rather than making the request public, he writes to a personal English friend, Lord Clarendon, who is a member of the British government, saying: "to keep a cadaver as a prisoner is not worthy of you, nor is it possible on the part of a government such as yours. The restitution of these remains is the final act of putting behind us the fifty years that have passed, and will be the seal placed on our reconciliation, and our close alliance."

The British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, considers and accepts the request.

The transfer is opposed by some in the French parliament, including Alphonse de Lamartine, who fears that it will stir republican sentiment in France, but it is welcomed by the population.

A warship, the frigate Belle-Poule, is dispatched to Saint Helena, and Thiers works on the details of the design of the tomb and the plan of the parade that will carry it to the tomb, constructed within Les Invalides.

The Belle-Poule arrives in Cherbourg on September 15.

The return of the ashes is a huge success, attracting enormous crowds in Paris, but by the time it takes place on December 15, Thiers is no longer in the government.

More unexpected news arrives on August 5, while the remains of Napoleon are still en route from St. Helena to Paris.

Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of the Emperor, has landed at Boulogne with a small force of soldiers, and has tried to spark an uprising by the army to overthrow Louis-Philippe.

The soldiers in Boulogne refuse to change sides; Louis-Napoleon is captured, taken to the Conciergerie in Paris, and put on trial.

He is sentenced to life in prison, and sent to serve his sentence to the fortress of Ham.

The year 1840 also brings a political crisis between France, Russia and England because of France's support for Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt.

Ali is a long-time ally of France; in 1829 he had given the Luxor obelisk, now standing in the Place de la Concorde, to France.

Lord Palmerston is convinced that the French will not fight, and sends a fleet to bombard Beirut and threaten Egypt.

The French cabinet is divided, fearing that France is not ready for war; the French army is already engaged in an expensive military conquest of Algeria.

The King makes it clear to Thiers that he wants peace.

Thiers offers to resign, but the King refuses his resignation, arguing that he wants the British to believe that France will fight.

When Thiers drafts a note to Britain warning that a British ultimatum to Egypt will upset the global balance of power, and he orders construction of a new ring of fortresses around Paris.

Palmerston does not attack Egypt, and the crisis ends.

The fortifications begun by Thiers during crisis will eventually be finished, and will become known as the Thiers wall, which will later become (and remain today) the city limits of Paris.

After the end of the crisis, tensions remain  between the King and Thiers.

Thiers drafts the King's annual address to the Chamber of Deputies, adding the line, "France is strongly attached to peace, but it will not purchase peace at a price unworthy of the nation and its King," and will not sacrifice the "sacred independence and national honor which the French Revolution had put into his hands."

Louis-Philippe removes this line from the speech, considering it too provocative to other European rulers.

Thiers promptly offers his resignation on October 29, and this time it is accepted.

A month later, he rises in Parliament to denounce the King's foreign policy, declaring that France has lost its influence in the Middle East, and has a duty to defend Egypt against Britain, and Turkey against Russia.

Adolphe Thiers, who has served Louis-Philippe’s government in a variety of positions, including foreign minister, throughout the 1830’s, resigns in 1840 (although remaining a deputy) over his inability to persuade Louis-Philippe to pursue an anti-British policy.

Adolphe Thiers publishes the first volume of his massive study of Napoleon I, History of the Consulate and the Empire, in 1845.